


After Hell

by Artherra



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Boy King of Hell Sam Winchester, Dark Sam Winchester, Dark fic, Gen, Original Character(s), Post-Canon, atmospherical horror, trigger warning for animal death and gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 08:21:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16869475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artherra/pseuds/Artherra
Summary: Prompt: With their contract about to expire, a hell-bound soul starts seeing the beastly, wild eyes of some otherworldly animal watching them from the shadows, biding its time. Desperate to seek help before time runs out, they confide in a stranger.





	After Hell

It started with a dream.

An old church, broken and forgotten, standing in a desert, which stretched out beyond what he could see, from the empty horizon to where the setting sun didn’t reach anymore.  
It was hot, empty. 

But worst of all, he wasn’t alone.

He saw it at the edge of his vision. Saw it’s footprints. It didn’t resemble anything he knew - he’d hunted deer, he’d hunted wolves, he’d hunted creatures human and less so, but the five-fingered mark stays unknown. Unrecognized.  
While the creature it belonged to ran free.

In the first dream he didn’t even get through the doors of the church. He’d just jumped for the handle when the dream was swept away.  
He woke up seeking safety, not finding any inside the bland, ugly walls of the motel room. He filed the dream away. It didn’t matter, there was more to worry about.

The second dream was worse.

It was nighttime in the desert, cold and dry. Unsettling. The ground cracked under his feet, stars shone above his head. 

He wasted no time going for the church, his hands shaking when he opened the door and shut it again, not caring about the noise. Maybe it’s still just a wild animal, maybe it won’t try to get inside.  
Maybe. He still locked the door, barricaded it with everything he could find.  
Checked for holes, barricaded those too.

He saw a glimpse of two yellow dots through the smudged glass, the movement almost too fast to notice.  
There was no sound, except for his rapid breaths.  
“Please, G-d, help me,” pathetic or not, he begged, staring out of the window, straining his eyes.

His breathing stopped when he heard the wood crack behind him. 

He turned around, only to face a skull with dozens of teeth and golden eyes.

His own scream woke him up.  
And it only got worse from there.

He scoured websites, books, whole hunter libraries for an explanation. For anything that might tell him what was going on. A curse? One of those not-so-poetic ones that made people go insane?  
He kept running into demonic lore, but he knew that was impossible.

It had been years since Hell’s gate was shut. 

It had been even longer since the new king of Hell started getting too much power. He remembered the terror the demon created, the hopeless days of fear and blood. But when it mattered, they had won. The king lost it all, just because some poor bastard found the tablet’s translation.

Demons couldn’t influence Earth. They should be all dead by now, anyway, as Hell should’ve fallen apart with no souls to power it.  
And all ongoing seals were supposed to be terminated, when there was nothing left to collect them.

Yeah, he regretted what he did, all those years ago. It was stupid. But it shouldn’t have consequences anymore.

Well, he thought that until the dreams stopped being just dreams.

First, there were the poems. Simple verses carved into the wall where he slept. Called at death, at suffering, at confinement, an unfair fate of some sort. He had a sick feeling he knew what it meant.

He started finding claw marks at his door. Wolf footprints where he walked, circling the place whenever he went - out of reach but still too close. He never saw, never heard anything.

The dolls and symbols appeared next, like some bad remake of the Blair Witch. Little wooden figurines, inhuman shapes decorated with clumps of dried blood, appeared on his windowsill. Symbols, unknown language, unknown origin, drawn at his door.

It was when he came outside, only to find a couple of beheaded ravens, that he snapped. This was serious. If it was a prank of some sort, or a curse - a witch playing with him, knowing his history - he was done with it.

The first person he went to was his hunting partner, who just recommended him to go take a break or contact the local white witch. Nobody took demonic signs seriously anymore - all hunters cared about now were the new mutations of werewolves and getting rid of the significantly greater number of ghosts.

He decided for the latter.

He didn’t trust witches, not even the “good” ones, but it wasn’t like he had more options.  
Like, sure, angels existed, but it wasn’t like they cared about anything more than their own problems. It used to be different.  
Everything used to be so much different.

The witch’s cabin was a mess of things he didn’t trust and didn’t know. The whole place smelled of a sick combination of lavender and garlic, like if somebody really needed to hide a smell of something else and didn’t know how to do it discreetly.  
The witch himself was no better.

He spoke weirdly, almost in verses, handled himself like a king while talking rather sheepishly. The long black coat, with buttons made from what he was pretty sure was gold, didn’t suit the shaky, thin form. He also asked questions.  
Almost too specific.

“Tell me more about the wolf, the one you’ve seen,” the witch prompted, while looking somewhere behind him. Not even paying attention, jittery.

“It wasn’t a wolf. More like a… I don’t know. I bear? A dragon? It had a goat skull for a head. And golden eyes. I don’t know what it was.” 

The witch finally looked at him. His eyes were that dark color of oak wood used to build window frames.  
“Can you tell me more about the signs?”

He started talking, saying all the different details without really paying attention to the flow of words. He had said this many times, had went over it himself a countless more. He glanced around the cabin, not finding anything interesting in particular, until his gaze fell upon a couple of twig figures.  
The same as the ones appearing at his windowsill, the same as the ones he just talked about.

He went to turn back around to ask the witch, the question already on his tongue.  
It fell away in an instant.

The witch’s face was replaced by a long goat skull, broken parts in places reinforced by thin veins of precious metal.  
His eyes met with pools of liquid gold. A drop of it flowed down the pale bone like a tear, burning a hole in the table where it fell down.

“No,” he breathed out.

The thing leaned closer. “I have to say, you aren’t as dumb as I thought you’d be. You knew it was us. If only somebody cared.”

“No, this is impossible. You were supposed to be long dead, It’s G-d’s will!”

It’s head tilted. The neck was covered in burns.  
“You poor little thing. If only you could open your eyes.”

He wanted to run, to bail, but found that he couldn’t move an inch.

“G-d doesn’t care. He left - long, long ago.”  
He couldn’t help but stare in horror at the dozens of fangs. The gold of the eyes were too unfeeling, like staring into the Void, the Void staring back.

“There’s always a way. And we’re not the ones who run from everything.”

It couldn’t grin, but he could still feel it gloating.  
The only things he could feel were terror, hate and regret.

“Enjoy your last ten seconds, James.”


End file.
